Portuguese writer Mário de Sá-Carneiro was born in 1890 and moved to Paris in 1912, where died in 1916. In the course of his short literary career, a large part of which was developed in Paris, he created a collection of literary works that was broad in terms of the literary genres they encompassed, and very innovative for his time, in the context of the literature written in Portuguese.

In the span of five years (1912 to 1916), he authored two plays Amizade [Friendship, with Tomás Cabreira Júnior] and Alma [Soul, with António Ponce de Leão]; three books of fiction, Princípio [Beginning, short stories], Céu em Fogo [The Sky on Fire, short stories], and a novel, A Confissão de Lúcio [Lúcio’s Confession]; as well as two books of poetry, Dispersão [Dispersion] and Indícios de Oiro [Traces of Gold, published posthumously]. He was also a director, with Fernando Pessoa, of the modernist magazine Orpheu (1915).

In his works, his poetic voice and fictional characters often present the experience of the subject that comes from a semiperipheral context — Portugal and the Portuguese-speaking cultural space — and undergoes the contrasting modern capitalist life in a main European metropolis — Paris —, raising questions still very much at the center of today’s debates in the discussion on the relations between European nations and cultural capital. His work portrays a modern identity gap between the idealized well-integrated self and the melancholic experience of dissolution and loss. At the same time, Sá-Carneiro’s fiction provides an innovative inquiry into the boundaries of the performance of gender — in fact brazenly questioning in 1912 the very conception of the existence of exclusively two genders, male and female. His fiction also frequently addresses the coming of age of young artists and writers.

In his works Sá-Carneiro comes to experiment with avant-garde discourses, influenced by artistic movements such as Cubism and Futurism, which were at their height in Paris while the author lived there. Mário de Sá-Carneiro’s role and contribution to the international modernist and avant-garde movements is currently the subject of great international interest, as indicated by the plethora of international academic colloquia and publications, in recent years, and this website seeks to contribute to divulging his work.